silent unction

I recently finished reading an extraordinarily long novel (roughly 2000 pages) which held my attention throughout like few others have. Without question, it was one of the most impressive novels I've ever read, and I'll remember and cherish it always. I shared the enjoyment of reading it with my wife, and beyond that, saw fit to mention it to just a couple people.

This is so far out of character for my conception of myself that it gave me serious pause. In the past, generally speaking, I'd hasten to get everybody I knew to read such a compelling book. I'd bring the full force of my personality to bear evangelizing for it. It's not that I would be especially obnoxious or indiscriminate in trying to share things. It's just that this book was easily among the best I've ever read, and certainly, something of that quality would have erstwhile compelled me to spread the joy of reading it far and wide.

But we age, and our social circles contract, and the people we remain in contact with grow busier and busier, and less inclined to try things which are not in their habits, or perfectly suited to their preferences. And so the zeal that formerly motivated me to tell the world was reduced over time, in consequence anyway, to making blog posts, and then Facebook posts, and then tweets, and then, basically, to silence.

I can see the same overall trend in my life. Always a fan of words, but growing willfully quieter by the year, as experience teaches me more and more how little an impact my words are likely to have. Can you remember, two years ago, how I spent December issuing forth the best things I'd posted on-line that year? But no such thing could be concocted from last year or this one. They are too empty.

In some ways, I am my own worst advocate. I wrote a book, and put it up for crowd-nomination to the Kindle Scout platform (which I would be much obliged for you to nominate, if you haven't already). I posted about it on social media, and received but few nominations, hardly enough to have any hope of actually qualifying. Then, my wife and some friends shared it on their respective pages, and the nominations started pouring in! It was moving to be so supported, but it was also very strange, considering my wife and I share most of the same social media connections.

True, there was more to my wife's post than my own, and social media is a poor place to go looking for anything, but the experience simply underscored my own poor abilities to engage with my social network. I used to feel differently, and I don't know if my own abilities have faded, or if the entire process has gotten more difficult, or if (the scariest option) I was never any good at it, and have just gotten better at evaluating outcomes.

The lesson here is that there are other, surer ways (for me) to engage with people than this thing called 'the internet'. In the spring, I will be teaching a university course for the first time, one on Business Law. Now I have a whole host of new concerns to occupy me, but if I do it right, I will have quite the captive audience. So I need to debate with myself what things I should teach them, what I really want them to come away with, besides a sense that there are a whole lot of Business Law concepts they have yet to learn.

I want to make the course my own, in a variety of ways, but naturally I hesitate. The indelible marks of my personality will characterize it whatever I do, but how much do I really want to turn this into a soapbox? How much do I really understand, and how much value is there in what I have to say? Nowadays I spend most of my time as a sounding board, and when I'm truly heeded, it is with great, staggering reluctance. That is one way to live a life, but it's really no way to teach a class. A teacher should have authority. So once again I must redefine my relation, and build a new identity. It is a task which wears thin.

Ultimately, I will be okay. That is the way of things. But the road to being okay is not one of stark, abrupt transformation. It is a path of a thousand little steps, and many questions asked along the way. These are some of them.

Disney Movie Reviews #6: Make Mine Music

When I started this review project, I committed myself to reviewing every full-length animated feature film released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios, as taken from this list. I thought those would be reasonable bounds to limit myself, while leaving room to explore a few lesser-known films. You'll notice Make Mine Music skips over a few on the list, as I'm still wrestling with whether those can be considered "animated" films. Unfortunately, while I'm sure Make Mine Music belongs, I've learned exactly why it's not quite as famous as its forebears.

There are two title cards. The one on the right is a physical book, as Disney wonts.

Released in 1946, Make Mine Music has a lot in common, at first glance, with Fantasia. Both are comprised of a series of unrelated shorts set to music. But where Fantasia was developed as a unified product around the central pillar of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Make Mine Music was just a jumbled collection of whatever ideas Disney had lying around. It's true that the studio was reeling from the financial and staffing shortfalls inflicted by World War II, and they needed to just throw whatever they could together to stay afloat, but wasn't Dumbo produced in a similar environment? I didn't like Dumbo very much, but I prefer it to this.

Perhaps not everyone would agree.

I structured my Fantasia review as an examination of each piece individually, but Make Mine Music doesn't really merit that level of scrutiny. It's no more than a hodgepodge, and just as you wouldn't gain much from reading too closely into the individual parts of a stew, we will be better served focusing on the whole.

Although it's since been removed from the North American release, Disney originally opened the movie with the Martins and the Coys, a celebration of rednecks murdering each other. Apparently the gun violence and stereotypical portrayals were a little too much? It was hard for me to find, and it doesn't really add anything to the whole. It's just a silly, lighthearted exploration of the early days of American gang wars.

This is how you should react when your baseball team is doing badly, apparently.

Even with its removal, there's still a ton of cartoon violence throughout, actually, which starkly sets it apart from previous Disney movies. Three of the five pieces featuring humans involve guns prominently, and that giant knife in the picture above is from the fourth. Maybe the nation just had battle on the brain so soon after the war, but it paints a pretty disturbing picture nonetheless.

This is our introduction to Peter of Peter and the Wolf.

But it's not all the gunplay that puts me off. Death is a real and more vicious consequence than in anything we've yet seen. More than once, a hero is killed and goes off to Heaven, which I guess is a pretty nice place, but it's still not a very happy thought. The weird thing is that these deaths aren't treated as grave events, but more likely a silly bump in the road of life. That's a pretty big bump. (In fact, the UK required Disney to censor scenes featuring deceased characters & Heaven's gates as inappropriate subjects for a children's movie!)

Sonia actually isn't dead, but we still get treated to this farewell shot. Nice to know there's a Russian duck heaven.

This would normally be the part of the review where I start to tie everything together, identifying a few key themes that permeate the work, and really dig into what Disney was trying to say. But that's just the problem here:  there's nothing really unifying anywhere in Make Mine Music. The shorts have wildly differing art styles, and even the level of animation quality jumps dramatically up and down between them.

The hands may be ghostly and weird, but at least they look great.

Which is to say primarily that a lot of the animation is quite good. It's still Disney, and there's tremendous care and craft in even the remotest corners of most of the shots. But this isn't like Pinocchio, where the quality of the animation outshone the story. Since, by and large, Make Mine Music has no story, it's somehow worse. Pinocchio annoyed me because at times the story was bad (from an adult perspective, anyway), but Make Mine Music commits the much greater sin of letting me get bored. The quality animation is wasted, beautiful wallpaper on the world's most generic house.

The pitcher does what pitchers do, and nothing more or less.

Fully five of the nine (or ten, with the Martins and the Coys) shorts have no real plot to speak of, no drama, nothing particularly to get invested in or excited about. They were generally very pretty, and there's nothing wrong with creating something that merely exists to look and sound pretty, but I can't help expecting more out of Disney. A few of these pieces (I'm looking at you, Without You) seem to be in there for no other reason than to fill time with a nice song.

The entire piece is just alternating between this and a scene of some trees.

Like Dumbo, Make Mine Music was put together on a budget to ease the studio's wartime financial woes, and it worked. It's easy to look back with modern eyes and judge them harshly for producing an "inferior" product, but harder to justify that criticism in light of evidence that it was, ultimately, a sound decision. Maybe even more importantly, the jumble of different animation styles gives artists room to experiment with techniques across multiple forms, which is the only way real progress in the art can occur. There can be virtue in mediocrity after all.

At least it's weird.

But perhaps not so mediocre. Disney submitted Make Mine Music to the Cannes Film Festival and won the award for "Best Animation Design." The field was likely not that competitive, but all reviews from the time are generally glowing. Everybody in 1946 seemed to agree that it was no Fantasia, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless. I don't blame it for not being Fantasia (Fantasia 2000 is proof enough that lightning doesn't strike twice), but I'm looking forward to the big ones, the films that will help redefine American culture forever, like a modern-day Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, this ain't.

After this, Disney will make one more musical-medley film ("package film"), called Melody Time, in 1948. From then on, they will leave behind the musical conceit and focus entirely on narratives (until Fantasia 2000). Any professional musician can tell you that there are few techniques more challenging than turning music into gold. But Disney was willing to settle for silver, and that was good enough.

MAKE MINE MUSIC
1946
RATING: C+
REASONING:  Good music can't replace good drama. Not-obviously-experimental, boring at least a third of the time, and generally unmemorable at its best. There was an entire short about a whale singing opera and I didn't even feel the need to mention it. Only completionists should have it on their lists, near the bottom.